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This article is a version of Theory of Constraints[0] aka Value Stream Mapping:

- every system has a bottleneck

- fixing things _after_ the bottleneck will have no effect

- fixing things _before_ the bottleneck will make the bottleneck worse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints

TOC has its applications and is simple in principle to operate, but the focus on global bottleneck constraints leads to sub-optimal behavior when the bottlenecks stall or fill queues. A big problem is once you are clogging the bottleneck, upstream queues become progressively more clogged as well and restarts are a mess. Local queue constraints on pull systems (kanban is an example) give quicker constraint signals and smoother queue restarts. Reinerstsen's "Principles of Product Development Flow" has some great discussion of this

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